Black parents' fragile link to schools

The connection is vital for children, but it doesn't always take place

REBEKAH DEN, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER

By REBEKAH DENN, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Published 9:00 pm, Thursday, March 14, 2002

Students that have been expelled from their schools must complete a re-entry program at John Marshall High School before returning to their schools. The program includes behavior modification classes and offers very small class size and a highly structured environment. Here a small victory is acknowledged with a High 10 from teacher Amy Kendall.
Photo: Paul Joseph Brown/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Students that have been expelled from their schools must complete a...

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One of the most important factors for student success is whether adults at home keep track of them in school.

But given the disproportionate rates of discipline and academic success for African American students, their parents may need to be more connected to the schools than most parents. Paradoxically, this isn't the case.

In fact, some community members and educators say African American parents may wind up being even less involved in schools than other parents.

Some aren't familiar with the bureaucracy of schools; some say they don't feel welcome; some may be less equipped or inclined to deal with their children's discipline problems.

Generally speaking, "I have a lot of parents who want to be cool," said Chandra Oatis, who leads a behavior modification program at a Seattle middle school "re-entry program" for students who have been suspended or expelled. Some of the parents are young themselves, she said, and act as students' friends instead of authority figures.

Statistically, African American parents are more likely to be among that younger group.

About 24 percent of African American births in Seattle in 1990 were to teen mothers, the largest percentage of any ethnic group, according to figures from the King County Department of Health. About 4 percent of births of white children were to teen mothers.

The stakes are high, however, for African American parents of all ages and levels of experience.

Regina Conley, whose children are now at Franklin High, keeps an eagle eye on their schoolwork, and thinks other African American children get lost in the system because their parents don't do the same.

Conley remembers schools automatically trying to refer her son to a lower-level class without testing him to see where he belonged. After visiting lower-level and honors classes, Conley says she has seen the split along color lines and doesn't think white parents face the kind of problem she did.

Schools seem to be telling African American students, "If your parent shows up, we can do something," she said. "I just feel like, if I wasn't there, there's no telling what they might do with my kids."

Some African American parents -- like some African American students -- can feel less welcome in schools or less certain how to navigate their procedures.

Former Mercer Middle School parents Lisa Williamson and Merrillee Smith often hear the judgment that minority parents never get involved in their children's education. But the mothers said they found the response far from welcoming when they started visiting the school.

Williamson's first problem came, she said, when she visited her daughter's special education classroom and began taking notes. She was just writing the homework assignment, she said, but the teacher demanded to see what she was writing and later told her she wasn't welcome to visit again.

The two parents' initial concern was academic, but it soon included discipline.

African American parents weren't being called about problems until their children already were suspended, which violated school guidelines, they said.

Once, when Williamson asked why her daughter had been sent to the office, a teacher slammed the door in her face, according to a written report by a Mercer administrator who observed the incident.

The parents said the school repeatedly summoned police that year for minor transgressions by African American students.

According to Seattle Police Department reports for the 2000-01 school year, police were called to the school for 24 incidents involving problem students, mostly fights and assaults. Seventeen -- 71 percent -- involved African American suspects.

Marquetta Patterson, 14, who attended Mercer last year, didn't see racial bias in the school's discipline, but thought the school didn't know how to handle its students.

"We were little bitty kids, and they were scared of us," said Marquetta, who is African American.

Police were called to Mercer to handle disturbances involving African American students for a range of reasons, some more serious than others. According to incident reports: a boy "struck a teacher on the forearm" when she grabbed him in the middle of a fight to break it up; a student bit another's finger; a student slapped another in the face and took her binder. Police also were called for threats ranging from a student who threw a pencil at an administrator and claimed he would "slug her," to a student who said he would "bring a BB gun to school and shoot you guys in the head."

African American students weren't the only ones involved in fights at Mercer, even though they dominated the police reports.

The school disciplined 82 non-black students for fighting or assaults that year -- 49 percent of the total -- along with 87 African American students.

Williamson and Smith called the African American Parents Helpline set up by the Black Child Development Institute, and eventually set up a separate group for African American parents at Mercer. They sent out a flier asking African American parents whether their children had been suspended without prior notice to parents or had run into other problems with the administration.

Eventually, they said, they felt the school accepted them as a productive group rather than a threat. But they find it harder to believe now when they hear schools talking about how minority parents just don't want to get involved.

"We tried to work within the system. ... We basically stepped our feet in the door and were treated like criminals," Smith said.

Mercer Principal Ruth Medsker, who came to the school last year, said a lot of good programs came to the school through its work with the African American parents' group, and that "the outcome was pretty positive." The school applied for a grant to bring in a "parent involvement" worker; added another counselor; and hired an employee to keep parents better informed when their children were having problems.

She thinks the parents initially did not feel welcomed because "if you come in when your child's in trouble, you come in with that negative attitude. ... I think that shows even more importantly why you need to make positive connections before those kinds of things happen."

It's frustrating for parents when administrators can't talk about personnel problems, Medsker said, but that doesn't mean nothing is being done about them: The teacher who slammed the door in Williamson's face is no longer at Mercer.

Schools in general need more -- and better -- ways to reach out to African American parents, and more parental involvement in the schools, said Franklin's Linda Thompson-Black, who works in a dropout-prevention program for the Seattle schools. "Some parents just don't know how crazy their kids act at school. The kids go (away from their parents' supervision), and the parents would be appalled," she said.

Some teachers are good at inviting parents in, Thompson-Black said; others are inflexible and defensive, acting afraid of parents and particularly afraid of black parents.

"You have to invite them, ask them, but you can't have an attitude of superiority or that you don't like people's children or that they're always acting up. You have to say, 'I want them to do well. We're struggling with this. Can you come and talk to them about what we're trying to achieve?'"

The group of Franklin parents led by Thompson-Black and her husband, UW sociology professor Al Black, is dedicated to helping African American students succeed through support at school, in the community and from their families.

The group worked with Franklin to establish an after-school tutoring program for students who are falling behind, and is working on a similar summer program. Other goals include hiring family support workers to make home visits before students get in trouble, and reducing class sizes so that teachers have time for everyone.

Although Thompson-Black doesn't doubt that some African American students are singled out inappropriately for punishment, she said the problem goes far beyond that.

"You could address that, and you'd still have academic disproportionality, and you'd still have children whose behavior isn't where it needs to be, and you haven't addressed the reasons for that," she said.

"We know that 10 percent to 20 percent of the people are creating the problem. It's a small group, but they require a lot of attention. There has got to be more people (involved). We always talk about these things, but we don't align the resources."

Instead, she said, schools see programs that are established with fanfare one year and then canceled the next. It's not surprising that the gap between races persists, she said, because nothing meaningful has ever been attempted on a broad scale.

"That's what gives people this feeling that no one is serious," she said. "How can we be serious if we know the kinds of things that help kids and we don't put them into place?"